Fruit of the Lemon

by Andrea Levy

Overview

From Andrea Levy, author of Small Island and winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Best of the Best Orange Prize, comes a story of one woman and two islands.

Faith Jackson knows little about her parents' lives before they moved to England. Happy to be starting her first job in the costume department at BBC television, and to be sharing a house with friends, Faith is full of hope and expectation. But when her parents announce that they are moving "home" to Jamaica, Faith's fragile sense of her identity is threatened. Angry and perplexed as to why her parents would move to a country they so rarely mention, Faith becomes increasingly aware of the covert and public racism of her daily life, at home and at work.

At her parents' suggestion, in the hope it will help her to understand where she comes from, Faith goes to Jamaica for the first time. There she meets her Aunt Coral, whose storytelling provides Faith with ancestors, whose lives reach from Cuba and Panama to Harlem and Scotland. Branch by branch, story by story, Faith scales the family tree, and discovers her own vibrant heritage, which is far richer and wilder than she could have imagined.

Fruit of the Lemon spans countries and centuries, exploring questions of race and identity with humor and a freshness, and confirms Andrea Levy as one of our most exciting contemporary novelists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312426644
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/23/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	722,961
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.79(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Born in London, England to Jamaican parents, Andrea Levy (1956-2019) was the author of Small Island, winner of the Whitbread Award (now Costa Award), the Orange Prize for Fiction (now Women’s Prize for Fiction), and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The BBC Masterpiece Classic television adaptation of her novel won an International Emmy for best TV movie/miniseries.

Andrea’s other books include the Man Booker Prize finalist The Long Song, also adapted by the BBC for television, and Fruit of the Lemon, among others.

Reading Group Guide

About this Guide

The following author biography and list of questions about Fruit of the Lemon are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach Fruit of the Lemon.

Discussion Questions

1. The first sentences and the last sentences of Fruit of the Lemon reflect each other. What does the author accomplish by doing this? What does this say about how far Faith has come? How has she changed?

2. What was the first thing you noticed about Faith's relationship with her family compared to her relationship with her housemates? How is she different in the two worlds? Discuss the concept of cultural assimilation, as it appears in Fruit of the Lemon. Do you believe such a thing exists? How voluntary is it on Faith's part? Have you ever experienced the feeling of being "Other"? Where is Faith most comfortable?

3. Examine the racism Faith encounters. How does she react to it, and why? Have you ever encountered or witnessed it? Is it different from the racism of supremacist groups? How would you have reacted, in Faith's situations?

4. Why is Faith so upset about her parents moving back to Jamaica? Why is Carl not? How are Faith and Carl different from each other? What does being black mean to them? What does being Jamaican mean to them? What does being Londoners mean to them?

5. Discuss the ideas of identity, family and community. How are they established and influenced, specifically in the characters of Faith and Marion? How does race factor into these ideas? How does being firstgeneration (the child of immigrants) factor in?

6. What are the dynamics of Faith and Marion's relationship? How does it change? How does Marion use feminism to disguise her feelings about race? Are gender and race comparable? Which is more of an influence?

7. Examine the scene on pages 137-143. What does it reveal about Faith and her life? How do Carl and Ruth perceive her? How does she perceive them? Why does Ruth become hostile toward her? What do you think of Ruth in retrospect, knowing that she has been raised in a white family?

8. How does Faith confront the racism she encounters? Reread the scene in the pub, with Simon, his mother, and the man who talks to Faith about Jamaica. How does each of the characters react to the man's story? Why does Faith express regret over telling the man about slave names? How does the man react to it? What happens in the dialogue between Faith and Simon's mother, afterwards? What is your impression of Simon's mother?

9. What motivates Faith's decision to visit Jamaica? Is there a final straw? How does she feel on the journey there, and once she arrives in the airport? Have ever you experienced something similar? How are things both familiar and foreign at the same time? What are Faith's first impressions of her family, especially Auntie Coral? How is her perception affected?

10. There is a major change in narration when Faith is in Jamaica. Why do you thinks this happens, and what does it indicate? Consider what Coral says on page 185: "You must have lost time somewhere...You can't leave England and come all that way without losing some bit of yourself." How does the movement of time within the story change? What are Faith's feelings of displacement? How does she begin to recognize herself within her family and Coral's stories?

11. When did you first notice a change in Faith? Examine the chapter ‘Wade's Story Told to Me by Violet.' How does her idea of her parents change? Could you identify with her? Consider the idea of the ‘Mother Country.' Where does this term come from, and what does that have to do with Faith? What does the ‘Mother Country' mean, historically, emotionally and metaphorically?

12. Discuss Faith's realizations in the last few pages of the book. What do they reveal about parents and children? How has Faith's perception of race and racism changed? About her parents and friends? Why do you think that Faith never wanted to hear her parents talk about Jamaica? How has her relationship with them changed?

13. Did Fruit of the Lemon change your ideas about race and racism? What subtleties did it reveal? How familiar or unfamiliar was Faith and her story? How did your perception of her change? What does Fruit of the Lemon say about self-realization?

Editorial Reviews

Levy's raw sense of realism and depth of feeling infuses every line.” —Elle

“Bright and inventive . . . Levy's command of voices, whether English or Jamaican, is fine, fresh and funny.” —The Observer

“Always refreshingly undogmatic . . . [readers] will recognize the truthfulness of the world which Andrea Levy describes.” —The Sunday Telegraph

“A thoughtful comment on racism and the importance of knowing where you are from.” —The Sunday Times

From the Publisher

Levy's follow-up to the Orange Prize- and Whitbread-winning Small Island explores how racism reveals itself to a young British-born woman of Jamaican descent, and how the pain can be healed by knowledge of one's roots. Faith Jackson is having a rough go after college: she's fired from her apprenticeship at a prestigious textile designer's and her parents are planning to move back to Jamaica. Though Faith has experienced racism throughout her life, she begins to fear her ethnicity will hobble her career. As she becomes more aware of subtle forms of racism at her entry level job in the BBC costume department and elsewhere, she witnesses a hate crime and, in its aftermath, is sent to Jamaica by her parents for a helpful holiday. It's there, in the second half of the book, that Faith learns a great deal about her extended family and understands why her parents may want to return. Unfortunately, the tone shifts, and what was effective through understatement becomes a rushed unfolding of her family history, complete with diagrams of who begot whom. The change in voice and the narrator's issues with island life (particularly her frustration with its culture) obscure the more poignant aspects of her newfound knowledge. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Levy, winner of the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Small Island, here delivers a solid meditation on the power of family stories. Faith Jackson begins a career in television with optimism only to be stymied by the casual racism that meets her everywhere in London. Confused, Faith turns to her Jamaican-born parents, but their solutions getting married and going to church don't resonate with her. Trapped between two worldviews, Faith literally takes to her bed until an invitation to visit Jamaica opens a new world of possibilities for her. The rambling, disconnected anecdotes of London life give way to an intricate tapestry of lively family narratives as stories of Faith's ancestors provide a foundation from which she can draw strength. Fans of Zadie Smith will appreciate Levy's explorations of race and class but may find it difficult to sympathize with Faith, whose na vet can be exasperating. A somewhat abrupt ending and slightly flat secondary characters hinder but do not spoil this otherwise solid effort. Recommended for large fiction collections. Leigh Anne Vrabel, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Adult/High School
This book is divided into two major sections. First, readers learn about the protagonist, Faith, and her family's life in England, and that her parents had emigrated from Jamaica on a banana boat, arriving at West India Dock on Guy Fawkes Night and really only knowing England from what they'd learned in school. Life is not exactly as they'd planned it, but over time Wade and Mildred adjust to their new home, get jobs, buy a house, and start a family. They are proud of their children, especially Faith's work in the costume department at BBC, but Faith, who is a credible but sheltered young adult, isn't quite so pleased, as she becomes aware of the hidden and public racism all around her. She decides to visit Jamaica, and the book moves into its second section. Faith meets the family she has known only through letters, photos, and the stories her parents have shared with her. Listening to her Aunt Coral's tales provides her with insight into her parents' lives that she never could have imagined. She makes connections with the people and places of their youth and returns to England with a different perception of her mum, her dad, and herself. None of Faith's Jamaican relationships seems to be deep, but readers sense that maturity is just around the corner, perhaps once she reconnects with her family in Britain.
—Joanne LigamariCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

By the author of Small Island (2005), which won both the Orange and Whitbread Prizes, an engaging tale of emerging race identity and heritage, first published in the UK in 1999. More comic than Small Island, this book charts Faith Jackson's growing, increasingly positive acknowledgement of her blackness, her ancestry and her position in late-20th-century England. Her parents came to England-the Mother Country-from Jamaica on a banana boat, settled, worked hard and had two children, Faith and her brother Carl, who grew up in a happy household in London. Faith, who knows almost nothing about her parents' past or her relatives in Jamaica, takes a degree in fashion and textiles, then moves out of the family home into a shared house and gets a job at the BBC. So far, so normal, except that whether seeking a promotion at work or visiting the country home of one of her white housemates, she repeatedly encounters ingrained, unacknowledged British racism. Her parents' plans to retire to Jamaica and a violent right-wing attack on a black woman working in a local bookshop tip the balance, and Faith has a breakdown. To help her recover, she is sent to Jamaica to visit her aunt. On the island, Faith meets her relations and begins to piece together her family tree. A sequence of anecdotes and vignettes-stories of skin color, poverty, hard work, elitism, aspiration and emigration-reveals the tradition from which she has emerged. Levy neatly exposes the complex history of black Jamaicans in this series of episodes, which provides Faith with an answer for those bullies and racists: "I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day." An enjoyable, deft combination of humor and telling observation onowning one's race and roots.

Kirkus Reviews